Posts Tagged ‘post office’

I’ve been a private sector guy all my life. I like singing for my supper. I like fighting on any consulting proposal, executive education gig, or speaking platform. I consider myself a front-line warrior in an economic war, and I like the thrill of victory and (in moderate doses) the agony of defeat. I have created employment for others (with some inevitable ups and downs), brought back currency to the countries that have been my home, and have traditionally thought of myself as an entrepreneurial type that makes an economic contribution to society without expecting much social credit for it. Most of my fellow citizens seem to believe the wealth generated by entrepreneurial success should be my sole reward, and that’s OK with me. With most of my family members in France as civil servants of one kind or other – many teachers among them – I have run at a young age as far away from government employment as I could, even moving to America to be at the frontier of creative capitalism and avoid any public temptation.

Through the vagaries of consulting life, though, I have found myself in the last few years confronted with the challenge of helping large government entities transform. As is often the case, civil servants have morphed in my mind from abstract aggregates represented by predatory unions into real people of flesh and blood, many of whom I actually like. It was always easier for me to develop a fondness for “teachers, policemen and firemen”, these archetypical public servants US Democrats like for us to visualize when they talk about government employees. But I have discovered that people working in post offices, unemployment agencies, government healthcare or ministries can touch my heart as deeply as any private sector person trying to make a living. As naïve as it may be, I have discovered that government employees are people too.

The social net may be protecting them better than most, and there are undeniably stories of excess involving them, but I have lately found myself wondering what it feels like to only be described as a sector to be shrunk, a cost to be minimized, or a citizens service to be improved. Strangely missing is a discussion of their own professional experience, as if their life had become irrelevant to the debate, or could somehow be reduced to a collective bargaining discussion conducted on their behalf by their unions. The miserable nature of the public servant’s experience has become a bit more visible in a country like France where a wave of suicides has spread through the country when government employees have been pushed to adopt new private sector practices, as has been the case at France Telecom. At this level of distress, it becomes hard to ignore the emotional reality involved.

It strikes me that the process of transformation used by managers of public entities deserves a lot of the blame. To improve productivity and service, public managers typically set goals and cascade them down through a chain of command that pushes front-line employees to higher performance level. This top-down, process-based approach has the net effect of squeezing everybody into a tighter and tighter box, producing extraordinary pain for all involved, from top managers to supervisors to front-line employees.

The key to reversing this process is to initiate a chain of empathy that starts with the interaction between employee and customer. Front-line employees and customers know a lot more than their managers about what to do. Together, they will engage with their customers and reinvent the system at the level of each post office, each blood donation team, each unemployment office, or each ministry’s office. Out of self-interest, public employees and customers will co-create better interactions between them. They’ll even figure out how to migrate these new innovative practices from office to office through peer-to-peer mechanisms, because, believe it or not, they talk to each other on the phone or on Facebook. The French post office has done that with great success (public disclosure: I have worked with them on their transformation). If the French post office can do it, shouldn’t any other public or para-public entity be able to do it?

For this to happen, though, senior government people will need to let go. This is not how senior government managers have been taught at the Harvard School of Government in the US, or the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) in France. And yet, this is what they should do: their role should be to lay out a few top-level goals, make some central resources available, then get out of the way. From there on, local post office employees will figure out with customers how to lay out or manage the local post office. Local unemployment office agents will team up with people looking for jobs and local employers to figure out how they should work together. Local blood donation staff will figure out with blood donors when and how to schedule each session. There is nothing like the self-interest of local parties to come up with innovative solutions and migrate their solutions from place to place to solve the huge societal problems that plague us.

The time has come to reinvent government. Disappointingly, none of that is part of the current presidential campaign discussion in the US.

Three or four times a year, I have to go to my local post office to send a registered letter or collect a package. Joe the Grump is always there, waiting for me, anxious to point out the mistake I made filling in my form and eager to send me back to the end of the line.

In my few moments of wounded altruism, I can even understand why he’s angry. The United States Postal Service (USPS) has just announced it is considering closing 700 branches to stem its losses ($7 B this fiscal year). The New York Times reports that mail dropped by 9.5 billion pieces last year and may drop another 28 billion pieces this year (total volume is 203 billion pieces). So, USPS management is shutting down physical infrastructure and laying off people. It may not be good news for Joe the Grump, but at long last, the postal administration appears to be behaving like a business. What’s wrong with that?

Plenty, actually. In fact, the USPS is squandering a historic opportunity. The current “lights out” strategy misses out on the fact that owning a physical space staffed with local people in the center of every city, town or village in America is a huge asset, at a time where local community activities are making a come-back. Local post offices could be the heart of those local communities. The first wave of community activity was Internet-based, relying on eBay, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. A second generation of communities is emerging, based on live people meeting in physical spaces at the local level. Food is becoming local. So is politics. Working far from home is so 20th century. Mutualism is back in. Economies of scale are out. So is globalism. Proximity is the new cool. Who could be better placed to orchestrate this human mobilization than the local post office?

We make fun of postal employees because we care about them. In truth, we cherish our (sometimes) friendly mail man, and like the notion of a local business staffed by local people who live among us (even you, Joe). The bank employee or the grocery store clerk rotates every two years, but the teller employee at the post office will be there forever. Greed will not overtake him. Service will remain affordable. Most of the time (when the line is not too long), we love the post office’s egalitarian approach to serving rich and poor citizens alike. In many countries, the post office is the place of last refuge for immigrants and older people. Perhaps post offices represent the socialistic edge of our ruthlessly capitalistic conscience.

If you’re interested in reading a bit more, here’s my thought on how this might actually work. The post office could become a physical place of exchange for goods and services, more like eBay or a farmer’s market. Local markets are notoriously inefficient, and the post office could orchestrate supply and demand for baby-sitting, cleaning and math tutoring services. Many businesses are too small to afford a physical space (local farmers, businesses run from home), but could use the building or parking lot of these post offices on week-ends. Larger, out-of-town companies are always looking for affordable points of distribution to deliver goods to local markets, or cost-effective gathering points for mobile phone and computer repair services, for example. But you have to go look for them.

The unleashing of such community forces would have to come from employees of local post offices. USPS’ top management would have no clue about local markets, but local post office employees would know which local suppliers they should help export to other parts of the country, or what products could profitably be imported and sold locally. Each post office would become a node in a country-wide marketplace where postal employees act as enablers of local commerce, rather than frustrated bureaucrats in a dying business.

Who I Am

I am a consultant and teacher who logs hundreds of thousands of air miles each year to share the principles of co-creation worldwide. As the President and Co-founder of the Experience Co-Creation Partnership (ECC Partnership), I work with a roster of global companies to implement co-creative, transformational programs, and processes. The April 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review features an article that I co-authored with Douglas Billings, "Community-Powered Problem Solving" illustrating how a brick and mortar business co-created solutions with their partners and changed the rules of the game. Earlier I co-authored (with Professor Venkat Ramaswamy) the book "The Power of Co-Creation: Build It with Them to Boost Growth, Productivity, and Profits" (Simon & Schuster Free Press, October 2010) and the Harvard Business Review article "Building the Co-Creative Enterprise" (October 2010).

WHY I BLOG

Co-creation is about connecting people’s brains. There is a method, a framework that can be taught conceptually and tools that can be implemented inside organizations. But at the heart of it is a personal transformation of people who suddenly see the world through a different lens. Consultants cannot tell those stories because of confidentiality. Academics are too removed from field work to have access to them. As if living at the intersection of these two worlds did not make me schizophrenic enough, I find myself of late developing a third, more humanistic streak: an urge to talk about the profoundly human aspect of co-creation. The stories I share in this blog are those of real people who have touched me in the somewhat random peregrinations of my global consulting and teaching career. Each of them embodies, in one form or other, the co-creation effect.